I don't mind reading online, I do it all the time. What I do mind is how the magazines feel perfectly happy abusing my eyeballs with enormous numbers of ads, many of them moving.
Consider, for instance, theglobeandmail.com. Click though to any article and you'll find a set of google banner ads at the top, a picture ad on the right, another google ad on the right, and another set at the bottom.
Compare with the average page in the print edition, which might have one or two ads per page, "shared" across all the articles. I find the experience annoying, and don't read online version of dead tree works for that reason.
Windows has a development environment for games. It bears some resemblance to the platform used to develop for the XBox and XBox360. That means you can develop for one of these, and have some level of commonality with other platforms.
There is nothing at all like this on the Mac or Unix side of things. There are _some_ common points with other Unix platforms, but these are limited to lower-level plumbing. There is no real "games platform" that exists that is nearly all-inclusive as DirectX:
OpenGL is certainly good, widely used, and essentially a standard.
OpenAL might be OK, but is not widely used with many other claimants to the throne.
There is nothing like Bink that allows for cross-platform in-game videos. This can be handled by one of a number of video libraries, but these are heavyweight solutions to a lightweight problem, and the ones that are cross-platform generally suck IMHO.
There is no standard GUI - using X on the Mac will result in instant failure.
There is no real equivalent to DirectInput, you have to roll everything by hand.
There is no standardized multiplayer networking system (some might consider this a benefit, but...)
There is no standardized lobby system for meeting other players online.
There is no standardized voice chat system. This is vital for modern online games.
So, when someone has a package that combines all of these parts into a single box, then "alternate platform" development might become more common. In the meantime we'll see "casual games" (which are often much more fun anyway) and hand-ports of blockbuster titles. Such is life; if you want to play modern games, you have to buy a console(or more than one) no matter how odious this might be to you.
My average power consumption is about 30 kWh per day. This varies dramatically from summer to winter, with winter loads being much higher due to an electrically heated kitchen floor, a low-efficiency fan motor on the gas furnace, and heavier use of lighting (although this appears to be a minor consideration).
One of these units would fit nicely into my utility room, and give me about 1/2 a day of power in the winter and several days during the summer. Power reliability in Toronto is excellent in any case, but this would eliminate every blackout Toronto has seen, including 2003.
> it would have had to be between Venus' and Mars' orbits.
They quote this as a problem?!
The baseline assumption is that the impactor formed in the Earth's trojans, which fixes this "complaint" perfectly. Unlike Jupiter (for instance), the Earth's trojans are not entirely stable, and any large objects placed in it will drift back and forth. This explains a VERY large number of data points:
1) it explains geological makeup perfectly 2) it explains why the impact angle was grazing 3) it explains why the Moon formed so long after the Earth
No matter what I try, certain articles are collapsed in the main-page view - including this one in Technology. Can someone tell me how to ensure that ALL articles are expanded?
Over the last 30 years I've watched well-funded lobby groups essentially take over the entire political process. Since these groups are generally better funded when connected to commercial interests, the political process has once again become beholden to big industrial concerns (it was even more so 100 years ago). It's not that lobby groups are bad, pre se, its that they are, by definition, lopsided; they present a single view of the world that may or may no be countered by the "other side" of the issue. As elections become more and more expensive, this process has accelerated to its own quasi-democratic existence.
Obama managed to use Dean's model to rally the individual for his funding. He's still beholden to large groups, but so much less so than any presidential candidate over the last decade or so. This is a wonderful opportunity to mute down the influence of lobby groups, because he won't be committing political suicide by doing so.
And no-one's talking about it. It's completely off the radar.
Much greater than that actually, but the vast majority is used up by inefficient television signals.
A normal analog TV channel uses 6 MHz of bandwidth, in that same space DOCSIS 2 can send 28 Mbps up and 38 Mbps down. That's more than enough to feed all of the televisions in your house with with its own HD signal (which is about 6 Mbps). DOCSIS 3 can bond up to 10 channels, offering about 500 Mbps. If analog is completely turned off, 1 Gbps are a very real possibility.
So the problem here is bandwidth allocation, not theoretical performance. If the cable carriers would be willing -- and they aren't -- you could have multi-Gbps feeds into your house right now.
> His diplomatic and geopolitical acumen arguably > saved our whole species from nuclear annihilation!
Uhh, and got us there in the first place. You should take off the rose colored glasses and read up on the guy some time. His view of a strongly black-and-white political landscape is what caused Vietnam and Cuba, and missed the huge potential in breaking down of the former Comintern bloc by driving wedges in Albania, Yugoslavia and China.
But overarching it all is Vietnam. He really couldn't see outside the "a commie is a commie" box, in spite of everything to the contrary. He saw Ho as a puppet of a domino advance coming out of Moscow and spreading southeast through China to Vietnam. Nothing anyone said could break him and his circle of equally myopic advisers out of this mindset.
Ho was a US ally in WWII and repeatedly extended feelers through that network to the US, all of them ignored. US support of France wasn't even enough to stop this process (although serious damage was done). There was an offer on the table to give the US a major base in Cam Ranh Bay, along with full trade and diplomatic ties, in exchange for their support for a peace process that would reunite the country. Perhaps the offer wasn't serious, but we'll never know because everything was hair-trigger and then someone shouted "torpedo!"
So when it came time to allow the people of Vietnam to decide for themselves who they wanted to govern them, he quashed the vote. Millions of dead people and a destroyed worldwide economy later, they finally got what they wanted in the first place. *sigh*
Yes, he put us on the Moon. Yes, he make the US the light of the world again. Yes, he was, overall, one of the great leaders of man. But "diplomatic and geopolitical acumen"? No, that was not the man.
> Parasites weaken the organism and lead to its demise.
Yet another statement by someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
"Parasitism" is the _definition_ of a negative inter-species interaction. OF COURSE they're going to weaken the organism. But when you take one step back and consider the more generic term of "symbiosis", of which parasitism is simply one type among many, it is clear that the minor downside is absolutely overwhelmed by the positive side.
Parasites are one of the major methods by which evolution occurs. In fact, it is generally accepted that the reason you have mitochondrion is due to a symbiotic relationship very early in the evolution of life on Earth. This is why your mitochondrion have their own, separate, DNA. Similar events that resulted in game-changing shakes to the gene pool can be seen throughout history.
To put this is perspective, consider this simple statement: there are about 100 trillion cells in your body. 90% of those are not human. That's right, 90% of "you" are simply "parasites" along for the ride in the nice warm and wet container of mostly water we call "our body".
So if parasitism is the downside of symbiosis, then I say BRING ON THE PARASITES!
> The problem is that modern welfare programs protect the stupid, lazy, and generally incompetent; > and allows them to breed without regard for the fact that the parents are not capable of providing for their children
Don't you just *love* statements like this? They're so incredibly stupid and ill-informed that it seems the poster is a member of the very group they claim to hate so much.
The problems you claim are modern have been commented on, ad nauseum, for millennia. The precise mechanism for the support has changed, but the reality of the support structure has not, not at all. Two thousand years ago we called it "the dole", a thousand years ago "the church" and within the last century or so "welfare".
Things HAVE changed, this is true. What has changed is that there are _far_less_ people on social support than at any time in recorded history. A wider variety of jobs is one reason, the various "workfare" programs are another. Are there people who soak the system? Absolutely! Do they represent any sort of problem? No, not really.
You should try reading some history some time, that might prevent you from playing the goat again in the future. Try "Life in a Medieval Village" for starters.
> the bar code image could have been processed by googles 150,000 servers
Geez, WHY? They were doing this in grocery shops in the 60's when the most powerful computers had less processing muscle than your phone's modem, let alone its processor.
Processing bar codes is trivial. That's the WHOLE IDEA.
Ummm, how about, you know, typing in the product name? Every product, even ones without a barcode, have a name. Do we really need technology for this?
And what does this have to do with Android? Certainly no-one's stopping you from making one on the iPhone -- in fact, there is one, I just downloaded it. It sucks.
Ahhh, I guess I haven't sprinkled enough "open" and "platforms" around my workstation, that will magically make it work better.
> What if they don't mean 500x efficiency, but instead 500x max power density
A fair question. The limiting factor on concentration is the electron/hole motility inside the semiconductor.
When a photon ejects an electron inside the semiconductor is is attracted to the charge depletion region at the n-p interface. It also leaves behind a hole, which is attracted to the conductor on the back surface. So you have the electron moving "up" and the hole moving "down". Once the electron reaches the depletion region it becomes available to power outside circuits, and likewise the hole, which you can think of as pulling an external electron into it.
It takes only a small amount of time to move from the ejection site to the depletion region, shorter than the time it takes to bump into a hole left behind by some other photo-excitation. But as the number of photons falling on the surface increases, the number of holes in the bulk material starts to rise, and an increasing number of the electrons hits a hole and neutralizes before the electron or hole become available to do work.
With traditional cells, this happens almost immediately, and the cost of the mirror or other optics will be more than the possible improvement in generation that you get by having less silicon surface. This is also due to the ironic fact that the number of available work electrons decreases with temperature, so as more light falls on the cell and heats it up, the efficiency starts going down -- way down.
You can get around this by using alternative semiconductors with better motility. GaAs is the big one. You can shine a whole lot of light, about 1000x, on such a cell before you start running into the same sorts of problems. You can also go to a multi-junction design, where you have several different cells stacked on top of each other that are tuned to different wavelengths. This doesn't help motility, but it does better capture the energy in the photons and thus lead to lower leftover energy that heats the cell. It's the combination of these two features that leads to the high-efficiency designs you seem from Emcore and Spectralab.
So is that what this article is about? It certainly doesn't seem that way. From what little we have there is nothing about novel semiconductors, it's all about the nanotubes.
I took physics before moving into the hedge fund world at a company that makes investments in the PV and alternative energy world. I see a constant stream of new technologies and companies, many of whom you've never heard of, many of whom you never will.
> his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption
Bogus alert! BWEEEP BWEEEP! Bogus alert!
Quantum efficiency of current silicon-based cells in most of the visible light range is on the order of 90%. Look it up. (here, be lazy http://pvcdrom.pveducation.org/CELLOPER/QUANTUM.HTM)
To satisfy your curiosity, the reason the very best silicon-based cells have about 22% _electrical_efficiency_ in spite of capturing 90% or more of the incoming light is due to a wide variety of reasons, including:
1) re-radiating of the energy in the IR 2) electron mobility issues, getting trapped at impurities and such 3) recombination, where the ejected electron finds another hole before flowing out of the circuit - this becomes more of an issue for shorter wavelengths (blue, violet, UV) 4) not making it to a conductor on the surface; you can add more conductor but that blocks more light. 5) The #1 reason is that a single bandgap, like in a normal solar cell, can only extract a single amount of energy out of the photoelectrons. For silicon the cutoff is in the red. That means that the extra energy in blue light (or green, yellow, and especially UV) is wasted, turning into heat. You can tune the bandgap up to get more of that energy, but that means you can no longer capture the long-wavelengths and all of that energy down there is lost. It's a catch-22.
So adding "500 times" the absorption is, obviously, impossible. Now its possible this is 500x in the UV, but surface recombination wipes that out anyway. To solve THAT you have to use multi-junction cells. They're in production already, but extremely expensive. So again...
> What costs more is finding problems half way through a project and then solving them by throwing > extra weight and complexity at it
Yeah. Tuned mass dampers? Really?
Look, I feel for NASA. I really do. They're being asked to build an entirely new launch platform and are given no money to do it. I get it, it's hard. And I also understand that the commercial interests that the administrations are so keen to protect have a vested interest in keeping advanced launchers from coming on-line, and that just makes everything even more difficult.
But come on. Ares is violating EVERYTHING we've learned over the last fifty years. This was supposed to be built from Shuttle components to save costs, and yet almost every single part of it is new. And if that were not enough, they're not even "new good", like the wire-wound SRBs or ASRBs that both got tossed over a decade ago. No, this is "new different", basically changing almost every parameter on-the-fly as the project changes but with absolutely no savings whatsoever. And if there's anything else we've learned it's that manpower costs overwhelms performance issues, so you're way better off having a single system that's overkill rather that two that cover different niches. So definitely toss that!
I'm a big supporter of Jupiter. So is everyone else I know that's been following this for the last couple of decades. So is, it appears, everyone in NASA under upper-management level.
Do you actually believe that? Really? You actually fell for that?
> Willingly signed != understood
So your argument is "all musicians are stupid"?
> It's copyright infringement
Exactly. Which is bad. So I'll just apply some moronic argument to dull that feeling in the pit of my stomach that means I really know deep down inside that I'm a thief, like...
> I'm more and more convinced of how little we really understand, and how we were irrefutably > engineered and not the result of some random joining in a soup of amino acids.
Let me make sure I understand your argument: "A is wrong, therefore I am increasingly convinced that B is right"
Isn't this precisely the argument you're complaining means "modern science is wrong"? Sure looks like it.
Do you know why they though solar systems like ours would be common? Computer simulations of solar system formation. In fact, the "standard model" was even published in Creative Computing, back in the day...
What were these models based on? The only example of a solar system we knew; our own. "Of course" there will be rocky planets near the sun and gas giants further out, it only makes sense.
So then we get better telescopes that can detect Jupiter-sized planets, and they show us lots of systems with gas giants in close. The model, based on a single example, is wrong. So we re-jigger the model to match the new observations, and conclude THAT one must be right.
$50 says once the interferometric planet finders come online this model goes into the trash heap as well. The universe clearly doesn't give a crap about our models, and builds whatever it wants.
The "frozen volatiles inside" I was referring to was the hydrazine tank from Discovery, of course. It remained protected for a good portion of re-entry, and was, of course, part of a system that broke up.
I think NewScientist put it best. "The Pentagon and NASA figure they might as well take a shot at the satellite... missing the satellite completely or just denting it wouldn't make matters worse"
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly, this makes a lot of sense. An imaginary treatment for an imaginary problem. Eggg-celent.
I don't mind reading online, I do it all the time. What I do mind is how the magazines feel perfectly happy abusing my eyeballs with enormous numbers of ads, many of them moving.
Consider, for instance, theglobeandmail.com. Click though to any article and you'll find a set of google banner ads at the top, a picture ad on the right, another google ad on the right, and another set at the bottom.
Compare with the average page in the print edition, which might have one or two ads per page, "shared" across all the articles. I find the experience annoying, and don't read online version of dead tree works for that reason.
Windows has a development environment for games. It bears some resemblance to the platform used to develop for the XBox and XBox360. That means you can develop for one of these, and have some level of commonality with other platforms.
There is nothing at all like this on the Mac or Unix side of things. There are _some_ common points with other Unix platforms, but these are limited to lower-level plumbing. There is no real "games platform" that
exists that is nearly all-inclusive as DirectX:
OpenGL is certainly good, widely used, and essentially a standard.
OpenAL might be OK, but is not widely used with many other claimants to the throne.
There is nothing like Bink that allows for cross-platform in-game videos. This can be handled by one of a number of video libraries, but these are heavyweight solutions to a lightweight problem, and the ones that are cross-platform generally suck IMHO.
There is no standard GUI - using X on the Mac will result in instant failure.
There is no real equivalent to DirectInput, you have to roll everything by hand.
There is no standardized multiplayer networking system (some might consider this a benefit, but...)
There is no standardized lobby system for meeting other players online.
There is no standardized voice chat system. This is vital for modern online games.
So, when someone has a package that combines all of these parts into a single box, then "alternate platform" development might become more common. In the meantime we'll see "casual games" (which are often much more fun anyway) and hand-ports of blockbuster titles. Such is life; if you want to play modern games, you have to buy a console(or more than one) no matter how odious this might be to you.
Maury
My average power consumption is about 30 kWh per day. This varies dramatically from summer to winter, with winter loads being much higher due to an electrically heated kitchen floor, a low-efficiency fan motor on the gas furnace, and heavier use of lighting (although this appears to be a minor consideration).
One of these units would fit nicely into my utility room, and give me about 1/2 a day of power in the winter and several days during the summer. Power reliability in Toronto is excellent in any case, but this would eliminate every blackout Toronto has seen, including 2003.
Maury
> it would have had to be between Venus' and Mars' orbits.
They quote this as a problem?!
The baseline assumption is that the impactor formed in the Earth's trojans, which fixes this "complaint" perfectly. Unlike Jupiter (for instance), the Earth's trojans are not entirely stable, and any large objects placed in it will drift back and forth. This explains a VERY large number of data points:
1) it explains geological makeup perfectly
2) it explains why the impact angle was grazing
3) it explains why the Moon formed so long after the Earth
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis
Maury
No matter what I try, certain articles are collapsed in the main-page view - including this one in Technology. Can someone tell me how to ensure that ALL articles are expanded?
Over the last 30 years I've watched well-funded lobby groups essentially take over the entire political process. Since these groups are generally better funded when connected to commercial interests, the political process has once again become beholden to big industrial concerns (it was even more so 100 years ago). It's not that lobby groups are bad, pre se, its that they are, by definition, lopsided; they present a single view of the world that may or may no be countered by the "other side" of the issue. As elections become more and more expensive, this process has accelerated to its own quasi-democratic existence.
Obama managed to use Dean's model to rally the individual for his funding. He's still beholden to large groups, but so much less so than any presidential candidate over the last decade or so. This is a wonderful opportunity to mute down the influence of lobby groups, because he won't be committing political suicide by doing so.
And no-one's talking about it. It's completely off the radar.
Maury
> Technically they ALL have 15 Mbit/s connections
Much greater than that actually, but the vast majority is used up by inefficient television signals.
A normal analog TV channel uses 6 MHz of bandwidth, in that same space DOCSIS 2 can send 28 Mbps up and 38 Mbps down. That's more than enough to feed all of the televisions in your house with with its own HD signal (which is about 6 Mbps). DOCSIS 3 can bond up to 10 channels, offering about 500 Mbps. If analog is completely turned off, 1 Gbps are a very real possibility.
So the problem here is bandwidth allocation, not theoretical performance. If the cable carriers would be willing -- and they aren't -- you could have multi-Gbps feeds into your house right now.
Maury
> Assuring every mutation survives in a period of stability provides greater odds we survive the next shock as a species.
Precisely. We say "it takes all kinds" for a reason. Don't they read Brave New World in school any more?
Maury
> His diplomatic and geopolitical acumen arguably
> saved our whole species from nuclear annihilation!
Uhh, and got us there in the first place. You should take off the rose colored glasses and read up on the guy some time. His view of a strongly black-and-white political landscape is what caused Vietnam and Cuba, and missed the huge potential in breaking down of the former Comintern bloc by driving wedges in Albania, Yugoslavia and China.
But overarching it all is Vietnam. He really couldn't see outside the "a commie is a commie" box, in spite of everything to the contrary. He saw Ho as a puppet of a domino advance coming out of Moscow and spreading southeast through China to Vietnam. Nothing anyone said could break him and his circle of equally myopic advisers out of this mindset.
Ho was a US ally in WWII and repeatedly extended feelers through that network to the US, all of them ignored. US support of France wasn't even enough to stop this process (although serious damage was done). There was an offer on the table to give the US a major base in Cam Ranh Bay, along with full trade and diplomatic ties, in exchange for their support for a peace process that would reunite the country. Perhaps the offer wasn't serious, but we'll never know because everything was hair-trigger and then someone shouted "torpedo!"
So when it came time to allow the people of Vietnam to decide for themselves who they wanted to govern them, he quashed the vote. Millions of dead people and a destroyed worldwide economy later, they finally got what they wanted in the first place. *sigh*
Yes, he put us on the Moon. Yes, he make the US the light of the world again. Yes, he was, overall, one of the great leaders of man. But "diplomatic and geopolitical acumen"? No, that was not the man.
Maury
> Parasites weaken the organism and lead to its demise.
Yet another statement by someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
"Parasitism" is the _definition_ of a negative inter-species interaction. OF COURSE they're going to weaken the organism. But when you take one step back and consider the more generic term of "symbiosis", of which parasitism is simply one type among many, it is clear that the minor downside is absolutely overwhelmed by the positive side.
Parasites are one of the major methods by which evolution occurs. In fact, it is generally accepted that the reason you have mitochondrion is due to a symbiotic relationship very early in the evolution of life on Earth. This is why your mitochondrion have their own, separate, DNA. Similar events that resulted in game-changing shakes to the gene pool can be seen throughout history.
To put this is perspective, consider this simple statement: there are about 100 trillion cells in your body. 90% of those are not human. That's right, 90% of "you" are simply "parasites" along for the ride in the nice warm and wet container of mostly water we call "our body".
So if parasitism is the downside of symbiosis, then I say BRING ON THE PARASITES!
Maury
> The problem is that modern welfare programs protect the stupid, lazy, and generally incompetent;
> and allows them to breed without regard for the fact that the parents are not capable of providing for their children
Don't you just *love* statements like this? They're so incredibly stupid and ill-informed that it seems the poster is a member of the very group they claim to hate so much.
The problems you claim are modern have been commented on, ad nauseum, for millennia. The precise mechanism for the support has changed, but the reality of the support structure has not, not at all. Two thousand years ago we called it "the dole", a thousand years ago "the church" and within the last century or so "welfare".
Things HAVE changed, this is true. What has changed is that there are _far_less_ people on social support than at any time in recorded history. A wider variety of jobs is one reason, the various "workfare" programs are another. Are there people who soak the system? Absolutely! Do they represent any sort of problem? No, not really.
You should try reading some history some time, that might prevent you from playing the goat again in the future. Try "Life in a Medieval Village" for starters.
Maury
> the bar code image could have been processed by googles 150,000 servers
Geez, WHY? They were doing this in grocery shops in the 60's when the most powerful computers had less processing muscle than your phone's modem, let alone its processor.
Processing bar codes is trivial. That's the WHOLE IDEA.
Maury
> People will be able to get instant comparisons of competing products
Like when I type "coco puffs" into Google?
Oh, I know, some sort of comparison site will magically appear that saves you paging around in your browser, right?
So, in that case, why wouldn't that site work just as well with a text search?
Oh, wait, NOW I get it, the 5 second savings I get by scanning instead of typing is going to completely revolutionize EVERYTHING!
Uh huh.
Maury
Ummm, how about, you know, typing in the product name? Every product, even ones without a barcode, have a name. Do we really need technology for this?
And what does this have to do with Android? Certainly no-one's stopping you from making one on the iPhone -- in fact, there is one, I just downloaded it. It sucks.
Ahhh, I guess I haven't sprinkled enough "open" and "platforms" around my workstation, that will magically make it work better.
Maury
> What if they don't mean 500x efficiency, but instead 500x max power density
A fair question. The limiting factor on concentration is the electron/hole motility inside the semiconductor.
When a photon ejects an electron inside the semiconductor is is attracted to the charge depletion region at the n-p interface. It also leaves behind a hole, which is attracted to the conductor on the back surface. So you have the electron moving "up" and the hole moving "down". Once the electron reaches the depletion region it becomes available to power outside circuits, and likewise the hole, which you can think of as pulling an external electron into it.
It takes only a small amount of time to move from the ejection site to the depletion region, shorter than the time it takes to bump into a hole left behind by some other photo-excitation. But as the number of photons falling on the surface increases, the number of holes in the bulk material starts to rise, and an increasing number of the electrons hits a hole and neutralizes before the electron or hole become available to do work.
With traditional cells, this happens almost immediately, and the cost of the mirror or other optics will be more than the possible improvement in generation that you get by having less silicon surface. This is also due to the ironic fact that the number of available work electrons decreases with temperature, so as more light falls on the cell and heats it up, the efficiency starts going down -- way down.
You can get around this by using alternative semiconductors with better motility. GaAs is the big one. You can shine a whole lot of light, about 1000x, on such a cell before you start running into the same sorts of problems. You can also go to a multi-junction design, where you have several different cells stacked on top of each other that are tuned to different wavelengths. This doesn't help motility, but it does better capture the energy in the photons and thus lead to lower leftover energy that heats the cell. It's the combination of these two features that leads to the high-efficiency designs you seem from Emcore and Spectralab.
So is that what this article is about? It certainly doesn't seem that way. From what little we have there is nothing about novel semiconductors, it's all about the nanotubes.
Maury
> If you knew WTF you were talking about
I do.
I took physics before moving into the hedge fund world at a company that makes investments in the PV and alternative energy world. I see a constant stream of new technologies and companies, many of whom you've never heard of, many of whom you never will.
And your qualifications are?
Maury
Forget EMS and even OMS, but quickfix is definitely a must-have.
QuantLib is the other.
Maury
> his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption
Bogus alert! BWEEEP BWEEEP! Bogus alert!
Quantum efficiency of current silicon-based cells in most of the visible light range is on the order of 90%. Look it up. (here, be lazy http://pvcdrom.pveducation.org/CELLOPER/QUANTUM.HTM)
To satisfy your curiosity, the reason the very best silicon-based cells have about 22% _electrical_efficiency_ in spite of capturing 90% or more of the incoming light is due to a wide variety of reasons, including:
1) re-radiating of the energy in the IR
2) electron mobility issues, getting trapped at impurities and such
3) recombination, where the ejected electron finds another hole before flowing out of the circuit - this becomes more of an issue for shorter wavelengths (blue, violet, UV)
4) not making it to a conductor on the surface; you can add more conductor but that blocks more light.
5) The #1 reason is that a single bandgap, like in a normal solar cell, can only extract a single amount of energy out of the photoelectrons. For silicon the cutoff is in the red. That means that the extra energy in blue light (or green, yellow, and especially UV) is wasted, turning into heat. You can tune the bandgap up to get more of that energy, but that means you can no longer capture the long-wavelengths and all of that energy down there is lost. It's a catch-22.
So adding "500 times" the absorption is, obviously, impossible. Now its possible this is 500x in the UV, but surface recombination wipes that out anyway. To solve THAT you have to use multi-junction cells. They're in production already, but extremely expensive. So again...
Bogus alert! BWEEEP BWEEEP! Bogus alert!
Maury
> What costs more is finding problems half way through a project and then solving them by throwing
> extra weight and complexity at it
Yeah. Tuned mass dampers? Really?
Look, I feel for NASA. I really do. They're being asked to build an entirely new launch platform and are given no money to do it. I get it, it's hard. And I also understand that the commercial interests that the administrations are so keen to protect have a vested interest in keeping advanced launchers from coming on-line, and that just makes everything even more difficult.
But come on. Ares is violating EVERYTHING we've learned over the last fifty years. This was supposed to be built from Shuttle components to save costs, and yet almost every single part of it is new. And if that were not enough, they're not even "new good", like the wire-wound SRBs or ASRBs that both got tossed over a decade ago. No, this is "new different", basically changing almost every parameter on-the-fly as the project changes but with absolutely no savings whatsoever. And if there's anything else we've learned it's that manpower costs overwhelms performance issues, so you're way better off having a single system that's overkill rather that two that cover different niches. So definitely toss that!
I'm a big supporter of Jupiter. So is everyone else I know that's been following this for the last couple of decades. So is, it appears, everyone in NASA under upper-management level.
Maury
> New artists often end up OWING money
Do you actually believe that? Really? You actually fell for that?
> Willingly signed != understood
So your argument is "all musicians are stupid"?
> It's copyright infringement
Exactly. Which is bad. So I'll just apply some moronic argument to dull that feeling in the pit of my stomach that means I really know deep down inside that I'm a thief, like...
> It IS free advertising
There you go. I'm sure you feel all better now.
Maury
Likely trolling, but...
> I'm more and more convinced of how little we really understand, and how we were irrefutably
> engineered and not the result of some random joining in a soup of amino acids.
Let me make sure I understand your argument: "A is wrong, therefore I am increasingly convinced that B is right"
Isn't this precisely the argument you're complaining means "modern science is wrong"? Sure looks like it.
Maury
> The energy from this decay melted the early earth.
No it didn't. Gravitiopotential from infalling rocks did.
> Look up the term "iron catastrophe" for more information.
Yes, please do so...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_catastrophe
Maury
Do you know why they though solar systems like ours would be common? Computer simulations of solar system formation. In fact, the "standard model" was even published in Creative Computing, back in the day...
What were these models based on? The only example of a solar system we knew; our own. "Of course" there will be rocky planets near the sun and gas giants further out, it only makes sense.
So then we get better telescopes that can detect Jupiter-sized planets, and they show us lots of systems with gas giants in close. The model, based on a single example, is wrong. So we re-jigger the model to match the new observations, and conclude THAT one must be right.
$50 says once the interferometric planet finders come online this model goes into the trash heap as well. The universe clearly doesn't give a crap about our models, and builds whatever it wants.
Maury
Oops, missed a cut-n-paste.
The "frozen volatiles inside" I was referring to was the hydrazine tank from Discovery, of course. It remained protected for a good portion of re-entry, and was, of course, part of a system that broke up.
I think NewScientist put it best. "The Pentagon and NASA figure they might as well take a shot at the satellite... missing the satellite completely or just denting it wouldn't make matters worse"
Why not? seems like the real justification to me.
Maury